10.31.07

More social engineering and wackiness in our bastions of “higher education”.

A mandatory University of Delaware program requires residence hall students to acknowledge that “all whites are racist” and offers them “treatment” for any incorrect attitudes regarding class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality they might hold upon entering the school, according to a civil rights group.

“Somehow, the University of Delaware seems terrifyingly unaware that a state-sponsored institution of higher education in the United States does not have the legal right to engage in a program of systematic thought reform. The First Amendment protects the right to freedom of conscience – the right to keep our innermost thoughts free from governmental intrusion. It also protects the right to be free from compelled speech,” said a letter from Samantha Harris, director of legal and public advocacy for The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to university President Patrick Harker.

The organization cited excerpts from the university’s Office of Residence Life Diversity Education Training documents, including the statement:

“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. ‘The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination….'”

The education program also notes that “reverse racism” is “a term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege.” And “a non-racist” is called “a non-term,” because, the program explains, “The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift the responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called ‘blaming the victim’).”

The “education” regarding racism is just one of the subjects that students are required to adopt as part of their University of Delaware experience, too, FIRE noted.

The “shocking program of ideological reeducation,” which the school itself defines as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs, is nothing less than “Orwellian,” FIRE said.

The school requires its approximately 7,000 residence hall students “to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy and environmentalism.”

“FIRE is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students’ rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech,” the organization said.

On a foundation blog, a student noted that one residence assistant told students, “Not to scare anyone or anything, but these are MANDATORY!!” And the training program for those who indoctrinate students includes the order: “A researcher must document that the treatment/intervention was faithfully applied (ex: specific lesson plans were delivered to every student, etc.).”

Further, the school requires “a systemic change” as a result of the program, FIRE noted. As one RA told students: “Like it or not, you all are the future Leaders, and the world is Diverse, so learning to Embrace and Appreciate that diversity is ESSENTIAL.”

“The University of Delaware’s residence life education program is a grave intrusion into students’ private beliefs,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “The university has decided that it is not enough to expose its students to the values it considers important; instead, it must coerce its students into accepting those values as their own. At a public university like Delaware, this is both unconscionable and unconstitutional.”

According to university materials, RAs are instructed to ask students during one-on-one sessions questions such as: “When did you discover your sexual identity?” “When were you first made aware of your race?” and “Who taught you a lesson in regard to some sort of diversity awarness? What was the lesson?”

“Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s ‘worst’ one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having ‘diversity shoved down her throat,'” FIRE said.

This particular student responded to the question, “When did you discover your sexual identity?” with the terse: “That is none of your d*** business,” FIRE said.

Requirements for students include: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality,” FIRE said.

The foundation said students even are “pressured or even required” to make social statements that meet with the school’s approval.

“The fact that the university views its students as patients in need of treatment for some sort of moral sickness betrays a total lack of respect not only for students’ basic rights, but for students themselves,” Lukianoff said. “The University of Delaware has both a legal and a moral obligation to immediately dismantle this program, and FIRE will not rest until it has.”

Apparently the VA got enough pressure to reverse themselves on their government suppression of the First Amendment right to Freedom of Religion.

Last month, a senior VA official told directors of the agency’s 125 cemeteries not to distribute or post nongovernment handouts on “The Meaning of Each Fold of an Honor Guard Funeral Flag.”

The memo also said the handout should not be recited at graveside services by cemetery workers or by VA-sponsored volunteer honor guards. The recitations include references to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

After an uproar among some veterans and Republican House members, a VA spokeswoman now says volunteer honor guards may recite any text requested by next of kin.

My detractors will find many reasons to explain away why this Jewish camp was spared. They will say that the many firefighters and their equipment kept the flames from destroying this camp. In part they may be right. The heroic efforts of the firefighters cannot be minimized. They are true heroes.
But behind the scenes, we have a Rabbi, not only refusing to leave the camp, but in typical Jewish fashion, throwing open it’s doors to the exhausted firefighters.
The flames came to within 100 yards of destroying the camp. But the flames stopped. All of the buildings were spared.
I thank the firefighters for their wonderful efforts. At a time when success against the fire was counted in yards, this was a much needed victory against the flames.
But before I thank the firefighters, I thank God, Jehovah-jireh, God Provides. I thank a Rabbi who remained true to God Almighty in prayer and thanksgiving. Who thought of others before himself. Who saved the camp with his faith in God.

The pairing of the rabbi and the firefighters was a natural one.

He had beds. They had been sleeping on asphalt. He had food and showers. They were grateful.

Rabbi Yosef Brod should have rushed down the mountain a week ago, when the Slide fire was burning toward Camp Gan Israel, the 75-acre Jewish camp he runs in the San Bernardino Mountains. The fire charred nearly 13,000 acres and wiped out 201 homes as it spread.

But Brod, a rabbi with the Chasidic Lubovitch, or Chabad, sect, stayed. “Have a nice day,” he told his employees as they evacuated. “Drive carefully.”

Over the weekend, about a dozen fire engines were parked by the giant Hanukkah candelabra at the camp. One firefighter chatted on a cellphone while another shivered in his boxers. A third asked Brod what the symbols on the cabin doors meant — they were prayer scrolls called mezuzot that are meant to keep their occupants safe.

State prison officials also came by, looking to house inmate mop-up crews in the camp’s bunks.

Brod says he kept the camp open because he believed that God would shelter the pine-shaded site, which the Chabad organization bought for summer and winter camps and weekend retreats. So Brod called his wife after the evacuations were ordered last Monday and said he wouldn’t be driving home to West Hollywood.

“She knew I’m so devoted to this place I wouldn’t leave,” he said. One of his employees stayed, too, and told Brod that, if need be, he would carry the camp director down the mountain.

By midweek, flames were licking the camp’s northern edge, and a firefighting helicopter tapped the camp’s pool for water. Brod ran a hose from a fire hydrant to the pool to keep it full.

He already prays three times a day, but that afternoon, “We prayed with a little more intensity,” Brod said.

The blaze halted about 100 yards from the camp’s wood-shingle main lodge and spared the property’s cellphone towers, basketball court and 16 other buildings.

The blaze had pushed a clutch of soot-dusted firefighters onto the narrow road that curves into the camp. Brod fed them. He offered mattresses and soap.

Down the road from the camp, firefighters had been dozing in pop-up tents, on cots and huddled between engines in a parking lot of the Snow Valley Mountain Resort in Running Springs, where the command center had been set up.

The news of better digs spread quickly.

So many firefighters streamed into Camp Gan Israel that Brod called other rabbis for help.

He found one fire crew sleeping on the grass just outside of camp, and offered them real beds.

“That’s kind of a big deal, to have a bunch of sweaty firemen stomping through your place,” said Ontario Fire Capt. Art Andres. “And this is a place where people pay good money to find rest or peace or something.”

A compact man with black-rimmed glasses, a salt-and-pepper beard and a black yarmulke, Brod held a prayer service for a Jewish firefighter.

On Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, Brod couldn’t work until after sunset. So firefighters signed themselves in, writing on a yellow legal pad that they had come from departments in Chino, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga, Tuolumne and other places. They ate a traditional stew that had been prepared before sunset the night before, when the Sabbath began.

As the men and women ate each night, Brod shared his interpretation of the week’s events. “One match destroys a thousand homes just like that,” he told firefighters. “If we have the power to destroy the world, we have the power to make it better.”

The firefighters sat in quiet with their thoughts.

Brod slouched on a folding chair in the camp’s restaurant-size kitchen as he recounted the week’s events. A button had popped open on his shirt, but he didn’t notice.

His two cellphones interrupted. A friend in Maryland was checking to see if he was OK. The other caller offered to bring oranges and coffee. Meanwhile, firefighters played billiards and table tennis.

After dinner, Brod went outside and climbed into his white Ford Expedition to check on his guests. He darted past cabins with nearly all the windows lighted, and slowed only to chat with firefighters. Their eyes were weary and their voices hoarse.

The lead article today in ArtsandLettersDaily is taken from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article, written by Evan R. Goldstein, is tltled “Waltheimer on the Hot Seat,” and presents Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer as martyrs of truth, lone critics, and near-pariahs for having dared write about the allegedly enormous influence of the Israel Lobby.

The professors have received a truly outsize advance, their book has appeared on various bestseller lists, they draw huge bookstore crowds all over America, and they are booked to speak in Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, and at the London School of Economics, the University of London, and the House of Lords. They have had to endure praise from David Duke, mugs and tee-shirts in their honor, and enormous critical attention, some positive and some negative. However, Professor Tony Judt, (who himself has valorously gone on record giving up his “right of return” to the Jewish state), is quoted here as saying that Mearsheimer “looked a bit shell shocked.”

Judt explains: “In this country, 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, it’s still very painful for someone who is not Jewish to be accused again and again of being anti-Semitic.”

Poor, misunderstood babies.

In our times, the defamers are presented as victims and so are ideologues who use terror to intimidate, punish, and subdue. Wealthy serial killers who mastermind suicide murders and Palestinian mass murderers are really the “oppressed” liberators of their long-suffering peoples.

I wonder: If I write a book titled “The Saudi Lobby” would any publisher dare publish it and would it command quite so much attention? I am going on record. I will write such a book if a publisher steps forward and agrees to publish it.

I dare the London Review of Books, which published an early, incipient version of the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis, to publish a version of my book, “The Saudi Lobby,” as well.

———————————————-

Dr. Phyllis Chesler is the well known author of classic works, including the bestseller Women and Madness (1972) and The New Anti-Semitism (2003). She has just published The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan), as well as an updated and revised edition of Women and Madness. She is an Emerita Professor of psychology and women’s studies, the co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1969) and the National Women’s Health Network (1974). She is currently on the Board of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and lives in New York City. Her website is www.phyllis-chesler.com.
We are delighted to have Dr. Chesler as a contributor to the Jesus is Lord, A Worshipping Christian’s Blog.

10.30.07

Dems doing what Dems do best…hiking taxes. These taxes will take money from you and I. That’s right…the working people. The very people Dems claim to represent.
Now I don’t know about y’all, but I pay enough taxes. I don’t want to pay any more. Period.
We (the people who didn’t vote for Dems in the last election) warned y’all that, if elected, the Dems would try this. Well, folks, now they’re trying it.

WASHINGTON – American families are feeling the crunch of spiking energy costs, runaway college tuition, ever-burdensome home mortgages and steadily rising prices for consumer goods.

These and other cost-of-living increases are eating away at the family budget — making every dollar earned and saved even more valuable. The very last thing families need is to see more of their paycheck confiscated by Congress.

Unfortunately, the U.S. House that already has passed $100 billion in tax increases this year to pay for bigger government and wasteful pork thinks otherwise. Last week, led by the Ways and Means Committee chairman, Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., congressional Democrats unveiled a breathtaking proposal: the single largest tax increase in American history.

It’s not often that we can speak in such absolute terms, but in this case, there is no way around it. Dubbed the “Mother of All Tax Bills” by Rangel and embraced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who told reporters last Thursday that she “certainly” supports the tax increase, this monstrosity would raise taxes on everyone: from the very poor to the very rich and everyone in between.

Indeed, with a price tag of $1.3 trillion — yes, that’s “trillion” with a “t” — the Mother of All Tax Bills is actually more like the Mother of All Tax Hikes. And to make matters worse, the Pelosi-Rangel plan kills tax cuts enacted by Congress in 2001 and 2003, making it a $3.5 trillion tax hike in total. Could the news get any worse for American families, farmers, small businesses and other job providers? Not likely.

So what exactly will the Pelosi-Rangel tax increase mean for families?

The most striking feature of the Mother of All Tax Hikes is that it raises taxes on literally every single taxpayer. In 2001, the Republican-led Congress and the president enacted a sweeping tax cut plan that lowered taxes for every American.

The Pelosi-Rangel plan would eliminate those tax cuts, raising taxes for every single tax bracket and eliminating the new 10 percent rate Congress established specifically to reduce the tax burden on low- and middle-income working families.

And as if that is not enough, the Pelosi-Rangel plan also would reinstate the marriage penalty, which — before Congress began to phase it out in 2001 — punished couples by taxing them at a higher rate than they would have been taxed had they filed individually. Indeed, no family would be protected from the Mother of All Tax Hikes.

I am pretty sure this won’t be the top story on your evening news tonight. The mainstream media does not want you to know that many Iraqis are thankful for America’s role in their fight for freedom.

While a donation of $1,000 may not address any significant part of the loss from California’s ravaging wildfires, already estimated at more than $1 billion, the source of that gift has some people expressing awe.

A troop of Iraqi soldiers assembled the funds and forwarded them to California for inclusion in the relief efforts being offered the thousands of people displaced by the still-burning California fires.

“That is the kewlest cool thing I have read all month,” wrote “no one you know” on the Minx forum.

The report comes from the U.S. military. Army Sgt. 1st Class Charlene Sipperly, of Bayfield, Colo., who works in the military’s public affairs division, released a news statement about the concern the Iraqi soldiers expressed for the California victims.

“Members of the Iraqi Army in Besmaya collected a donation for the San Diego, Calif., fire victims …at the Besmaya Range Complex in a moving ceremony,” she wrote.

“Iraqi Army Col. Abbass, the commander of the complex, presented a gift of $1,000 to U.S. Army Col. Darel Maxfield, Besmaya Range Complex officer in charge, Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq, to send to the fire victims in California,” she wrote.

What will it take for our government to stop catering to these people?

The head of the Likud Party’s foreign relations department gave a massive boost to the claims of Islam – Israel’s most implacable enemy – Tuesday when he inferred that Jerusalem’s Temple Mount was not sacred to the Jewish people.

The Temple Mount is the Jewish people’s holiest site.

Arab and other Muslim leaders and clerics, who assert that the hill is Islam’s third holiest site, have long and fiercely maintained that the Jews have no historical connection or claim to the outcrop the Bible calls God’s “holy hill.”

While secular Jews often appear content to limit their “right” to the Western Wall, Israelis who have the fear of the Lord and who know that their nation’s First and Second Temples were built on top of the mount will not agree to relinquishing it to the followers of another god.

Peggy Noonan is one of my favorite writers. Nobody can turn a phrase, to my mind, the way that she can – which is probably why she was among President Reagan’s favorite speech-writers.

Nowadays, she is the star of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion columns. I was reading her latest piece, in which she was discussing the latest incarnation in Hillary Clinton’s continuing series of makeovers when she observed;

“Mrs. Clinton is the tea bag that brings the boiling water with her. It’s always high drama with her, always a cauldron–secret Web sites put up by unnamed operatives smearing Barack Obama in the tones of Tokyo Rose, Chinese businessmen having breakdowns on trains after the campaign cash is traced back, secret deals. It’s always flying monkeys. One always wants to ask: Why? What is this?”

What a great line! It’s always ‘flying monkeys’! You recognize the reference, don’t you? Remember the flying monkeys that went after Dorothy and Toto and the Scarecrow on their way to the Emerald City of the Land of Oz?

Now, do you remember who it was that SENT them? What a perfect mental image! [Margaret Hamilton]

It seems that there are more flying monkeys beginning to buzz Hillary’s campaign, this time in the form of more illegal campaign cash. Illegal campaign cash coming from Chinese donors.

(MORE Chinese donors. This isn’t the Chinese donor who had the breakdown on the train, or the Chinese donors in San Francisco who donated more to Hillary than they had, or Chinese donors connected to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, like in the 90s.)

No, these are DIFFERENT illegal Chinese donors. New ones.

The Los Angeles Times did an undercover story on one of the Clinton campaign’s listed sources of cash in New York’s Chinatown, where it found, “some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate — Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

The Times noted that Hillary has raised more campaign cash for her run at the White House than any candidate in history, before telling us how she does it – at least in Chinatown. According to no less an authority on all things liberal than the Los Angeles Times, she uses the local mob.

“Clinton has enlisted the aid of Chinese neighborhood associations, especially those representing recent immigrants from Fujian province. The organizations, at least one of which is a descendant of Chinatown criminal enterprises that engaged in gambling and human trafficking, exert enormous influence over immigrants. The associations help them with everything from protection against crime to obtaining green cards.

Many of Clinton’s Chinatown donors said they had contributed because leaders in neighborhood associations told them to. In some cases, donors said they felt pressure to give.”

Let me repeat myself. This is the Los Angeles Times reporting, not some ‘vast, right-wing conspiracy machine’ or tool of the Bush administration.

This is one of the few times where screaming right wing smear tactics won’t work. The Los Angeles Times is as dependably liberal as Nancy Pelosi.

“At least one reported donor denies making a contribution,” the Times reported. “Another admitted to lacking the legal-resident status required for giving campaign money.”

The Times examined the cases of more than 150 donors who provided checks to Clinton after fundraising events geared to the Chinese community. One-third of those donors could not be found using property, telephone or business records. Most have not registered to vote, according to public records.

And several dozen were described in financial reports as holding jobs — including dishwasher, server or chef — that would normally make it difficult to donate amounts ranging from $500 to the legal maximum of $2,300 per election.

The paper also found that most of the Chinese reported as contributing to Clinton’s campaign have never voted. Many speak little or no English. Some seem to lead such ephemeral lives that neighbors say they’ve never heard of them, it said.

Desperately poor. Never voted before. Don’t even speak English.

You know. Your typical political donor.

There’s never been a time like this to be a politician in America. If you work hard at cultivating a network of liars and thieves, you too, can grow up to be president. Because if you get caught, nobody will really mind.

If anybody complains, just offer them something – end the war, free health care, when the sky is the limit and nobody really believes you anyway, how can you go wrong?

As evidence, allow me to introduce William Jefferson Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, two thoroughly contemptible politicians who together have racked up more scandals than any political team in history. And who, despite that, are poised to make history as the first husband-wife wife-husband first couple double administration the White House has ever seen.

There is no excess too outrageous, no ethical standard too rigid , no promise too sacred when it comes to the Clintons. When the Clintons left the White House in 2000, they had to send the cops with moving vans to pick up all the stuff they stole when they left.

Nobody really seemed to mind when the bill for fixing all the stuff his staff stole, sabotaged or broke only ran into the hundreds of thousands, rather than millions of dollars.

When Hillary ran for the Senate, it was on the solemn promise that she wasn’t planning to use her Senate seat for a White House run. Since nobody believed her then, (but voted for her anyway) nobody really minded when she broke that promise.

Hillary’s campaign is so shot full of financial irregularities, suspicious sources, and mysterious Chinese connections that it almost feels like the good old days when it was Bill Clinton with all the financial irregularities, suspicious sources and mysterious Chinese connections – and look how well that turned out.

You see, that’s the weird part about it. Everybody knows and nobody seems to care.

I always used to wonder how the antichrist could fool enough people, given that the Bible reveals so much about him in advance, to enable him to rise to the point of undisputed power without anybody saying, “Hey! That guy’s the antichrist!” and giving the game away.

Despite the best laid plans of the Revolutionary Communist Party, we blessed three (Ibn Warraq, Christina Hoff-Sommers, and myself) quietly triumphed at Columbia during Islamo-fascism week. But you’d never know it if you read The Nation’s online coverage. Esther Kaplan, author of “With God on their Side: George Bush and the Christian Right, ” led with her bias showing.

In her article, Kaplan spends ten paragraphs demonizing David Horowitz and then dismisses us as fellow travelers in only a mere two paragraphs. I am not complaining. If she had written about us at greater length, she would only have misquoted us or taken our words out of context even more.

For example, she sidesteps my points about the Islamist persecution of homosexuals and only notes that I “sounded an alarm against an epidemic of homosexual pederasty in the Muslim world”—and then likens me to Gary Bauer in his denunciation of gay marriage. Kaplan utterly fails to describe the “violent oppression of women under Islam” (which is also the title of a pamphlet I co-authored for David Horowitz) and fails to mention the heroic feminist struggles in the Muslim world which both Christina Hoff-Sommers and myself discussed.

Kaplan reduces the learned and brilliant Ibn Warraq to just one sentence—yes, the same Ibn Warraq who recently defeated Tariq Ramadan in a battle of ideas in London. I highly recommend Ibn Warraq’s new book, “Defending the West. A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism.”

Kaplan and the Nation share a similar point of view. Israel and George Bush’s America (not the Palestinians, the Arab League, or al-Qaeda) are the satanic “provokers.” And, shades of Walt and Mearsheimer: AIPAC and Campus Watch are the primary bearers of “hate” and they brandish academic “hit lists.” Edward Said and the politically correct Stalinists are heralds of the Second Secular Coming and can do no wrong.

Luckily, other reporters were also present. For example, Fern Sidman, who has interviewed me in the Jewish media, described us as “three voices of truth” in the article she published online in the Intellectual Conservative. When President Amadinejad spoke at Columbia, Sidman also interviewed Mary Lou McKinley-Greenberg, the activist who prepared the Questions to be posed to me for the Revolutionary Communist Party. Sidman writes:

“I met Mary Lou Greenberg about a month ago at Columbia University when she was there on the day that Iranian President Ahmadinejad spoke. Her group, the Revolutionary Communist Party was there with a huge banner reading, ‘Ahmadinejad is Bad but Bush is Worse.’ Her group was decrying a possible US invasion of Iran. As a journalist covering the event, I conducted an interview with her. She told me that in a communist society everyone would have the right to voice dissent. I asked her about gays in Cuba, (the only Communist country left in the western hemisphere,) and whether they had a right to voice their dissent, to speak out and identify as gays and she equivocated her way through a feckless attempt to answer the question. “

Dear Reader: Please note that I am publishing my remarks here and not in the pages of Nation magazine. I have learned that “the left” will only demonize their opponents and valorize fascists; and that the “Jewish left” will not, even at the midnight hour, talk or listen to anyone who has already been demonized by the larger “left.” (The Jewish left has, indeed, finally begun to talk about anti-Semitism on the left but they do so only in whispers, in small groups, and only with each other. Their comrades do not support them).

So: the West’s Queer Nation will not stand up for homosexuals who are persecuted by Islam and the Marxist and Secular Feminist Nation will not stand up for women who are persecuted by Islam either. What was it that Pastor Neimoller said about the Nazis who came for the trade unionists?

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Dr. Phyllis Chesler is the well known author of classic works, including the bestseller Women and Madness (1972) and The New Anti-Semitism (2003). She has just published The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan), as well as an updated and revised edition of Women and Madness. She is an Emerita Professor of psychology and women’s studies, the co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1969) and the National Women’s Health Network (1974). She is currently on the Board of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and lives in New York City. Her website is www.phyllis-chesler.com.
We are delighted to have Dr. Chesler as a contributor to the Jesus is Lord, A Worshipping Christian’s Blog.

Administration officials in Washington are working around the clock to facilitate the convening of an international conference on the Middle East in Annapolis, Maryland next month.

The primary purpose of this gathering will be to sanction the severance of Judea and Samaria from the rest of Israel’s national homeland, and out of it create a new Arab state called Palestine.

Israel’s “eternal and indivisible capital” Jerusalem is also to be divided.

On this score the international community is – without exception – in agreement.

But all is not going well for chief conference-convener, US President George W. Bush, and his point man, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Ms. Rice has made numerous trips to the Middle East in recent months, and plans another hop over in early November – just days after completing her last shuttle.

She has grown increasingly desperate to nail down some form of joint Israel-PLO agreement on which to base the conference so as to ensure it achieves some form of “success” before it actually takes place.

Thank God the “Palestinians” who – as the by now classic saying goes, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity – are unable to settle for anything less than everything, which at least some Israelis understand would constitute an agreement on the Jews’ part to commit suicide.

As a result, the most recent reports suggest the conference might not take place after all.

This would spell a disaster for an administration that has pinned a substantial chunk of its hopes for a legacy on the “achievement” of creating Palestine.

This week the Israeli Ynetnews website reported that Rice is blaming Iran for the unraveling of her plans, asserting (correctly) that Tehran is working with Hamas to scupper the conference.

The gang of mullahs is “fanning flames in the region,” she says.

Actually, it could well be Rice who is fanning flames.

In the past two weeks, as she has pushed with all her God-given skills towards birthing an illegitimate country whose creation will enormously harm the security and survival prospects of the State of Israel, wild fires have ravaged the West Coast of her homeland, forcing up to one million people to flee their homes in what has become the biggest peacetime evacuation of Americans in the history of the United States.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger Wednesday blamed the disaster on the convergence of “three things … very dry areas, very hot weather and then a lot of wind.”

It had made, he said, “the perfect storm for a fire.”

We’ve heard the phrase “perfect storm” before.

It was back in 1991, when President George Herbert Walker Bush and Secretary of State James Baker coerced Israel into attending an international Middle East peace conference in Madrid.

That gathering, which the US jointly sponsored with Russia, set in motion the train whose journey is meant to culminate with the establishment of a Palestinian state.

As final arrangements were being made and conference delegates began heading for the Spanish capital, an extra-tropical low weather system started playing havoc with the entire Eastern Atlantic Seaboard of the United States.

So rare was the tempest, that the National Weather Service labeled it “the perfect storm.”

The damages it caused totaled $1.5 billion. One place ravaged by the storm was the Bush Family Compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. It suffered windows blown out, water flooding in, and some structural damage as well.

That 1991 storm was by no means the only disaster to strike America at a time when its leaders were revealing their readiness to betray Israel by putting the tiny Jewish homeland and its small population on the altar for the “greater good” of the United States.

One particularly striking “coincidence” took place more recently, and in terms of magnitude on every level exceeded anything that had gone before.

What unfolded were two back-to-back situations, each one spanning eight days. The second period began the day after the first eight days came to an end.

On August 14, 2005, 14,000 Israeli soldiers and policemen moved into the Gaza Strip and began to order, threaten, push, and then drive thousands of Jews from their homes.

The “Disengagement,” as it was officially known, was carried out by the Israeli government under the leadership of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Notwithstanding its antiseptic title, it was the vicious uprooting and turning into refugees of men, women and children, and the wholesale destruction of their communities, towns and villages.

It amounted to nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of one group of people from a piece of territory in order to appease another group of people who hated Jews and rejected their right to live there.

For eight days we watched, and many of us wept, until all the Jews were gone. Hundreds of buses drove them out of Gaza and away. After they left, police went from house to house, marking each one with a special symbol to show that it had been checked, was empty, and could now be demolished. Beautiful houses people had built with their own hands and turned into homes filled with memories were bulldozed into piles of ugly rubble. The action was cruel, heartless, criminal.

Sharon cannot be acquitted for what he ordered his forces to do – and more than a few people believe he fell ill and succumbed to the coma that imprisons him to this day because of his actions.

But the real blame for this atrocity lies squarely at the door of the administration in Washington DC.

While paying a whole lot of lip service to plucky little independent Israel, president after US president has sat in the White House and directed a foreign policy in the Middle East that has slowly but surely pushed Israel’s governments into surrendering their national patrimony for empty promises of peace the Israelis KNOW will never be honored.

God, I believe, answered the crime of the hitnatkut in a way that was breathtakingly obviously His doing.

On August 22 of that year, the Jews of Netzarim, the last of Gush Katif’s 17 communities, were expelled. Their departure officially marked the end of the 38-year-long Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip.

On the very next day, a hurricane began forming over the Bahamas from where it would head directly for the United States. When it dissipated on August 31, eight days after it began, at least 1,836 people had lost their lives. More than $81 billion worth of damage had been done, making Katrina the costliest natural disaster in American history.

Again, many people watched and wept at the tragic site of hundreds of thousands of people being driven from their homes. Thousands of buses took them out of New Orleans and away. Policemen went from house to house, marking each one with a special symbol to show it had been checked for bodies or occupants, and was now empty.

It was so obvious it was almost bizarre, the way CNN interspersed its around-the-clock coverage of the evacuation from Louisiana with programming announcements about follow-up reports on the Gaza uprooting. We literally watched scenes of Israelis being made homeless in accordance with the wishes of the American government following scenes of Americans being made homeless by Katrina.

Many American Christians, among them some who lost their homes and all their possessions, recognized in the monster hurricane God’s judgment for what the US – as chief sponsor of the process that is robbing the Jews of their land – was responsible for.

The California wildfires, which are slowly being brought under control as I write this, began on October 20, two days after Secretary of State Rice completed a four-day visit to the Middle East.

Bush and Rice are squeezing Israel into making more concessions to please the Palestinian Arabs so that they will go to Annapolis next month.

There the plans are meant to be formulated that will lead to the uprooting of tens of thousands of Jews from their Judean and Samarian homes, the destruction of their property, and the final and irreversible handing over of that territory to the murderous and antisemitic PLO.

As Washington pushes, California burns, and a million Americans have had to flee their homes.

For the Bible believer who takes God at His Word when He promises to deal severely with the nations that hurt His people, it’s legitimate to ask:

Has God allowed the fires that have burned up 700 square miles of American land as a warning to the Bush administration to stop pushing Israel towards a peace that can bring no peace?

And if Rice goes ahead, turns the screws and forces Israel to the negotiating table in Maryland, will something even more devastating come upon the United States?

Chancellor Angela Merkel has joined a growing movement to criminalize forced marriages in Germany, which is growing less tolerant of practices among Muslim immigrants that clash with the nation’s liberal social values.

Forced marriages are generally imposed by young women’s families to keep them from dating. Prosecution is rare and must take place under assault laws that also outlaw threats and coercion.

Women’s’ groups have been increasingly pushing for forced marriages to be specifically criminalized, to ease prosecution and to send a strong signal that the practice violates German laws and traditions.

“I completely agree that forced marriages should be punishable as a criminal act,” Merkel said in a speech at a women’s conference held by her conservative Christian Democrats over the weekend, surprising and pleasing activists.

“We are thrilled that the chancellor has made such a clear statement,” said Sibylle Schreiber, a spokeswoman for the women’s rights group Terre des Femmes. “Finally she’s given a signal to the people that forcing your daughter into marriage is a crime.”

Approximately 3.3 million Muslims live in Germany, 70 percent of them of Turkish origin. Many lead secular lifestyles but some make strong, even extreme, efforts to preserve conservative values.

In recent years, several courts have upheld state-level bans on headscarves for Muslim women teaching in public schools. Immigration laws now require that foreign spouses be at least 18 years old and already have a basic knowledge of the German language.

The state of Baden-Wuerttemberg has proposed federal legislation criminalizing forced marriages. It passed twice, most recently in February, but has not been taken up by the lower house. Women’s activists were hopeful that Merkel’s push would accelerate the process.

Serap Cileli, a Turkish-German writer whose book — “We Are Your Daughters, Not Your Honor” — documents her escape from a forced marriage at age 24, welcomed Merkel’s initiative but said it was important to address the immigrant community directly.

“As long as we don’t teach the fathers, husbands and brothers to let the women live self-determined lives, this wound will never stop bleeding,” Cileli said.

Women’s groups and experts on immigration in Germany said it was difficult to tell how many women marry after threats or abuse, but enough flee such arrangements that several shelters remain busy.

The failure of our education is becoming more evident by the day. Instead of teaching useful skills and challenging our youth, the schools are more focused on social engineering and the “touchy-feely”, feel good aspects.
We are failing our children.

WASHINGTON – It’s a nickname no principal could be proud of: “Dropout Factory,” a high school where no more than 60 percent of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year. That dubious distinction applies to more than one in 10 high schools across America.

“If you’re born in a neighborhood or town where the only high school is one where graduation is not the norm, how is this living in the land of equal opportunity?” asks Bob Balfanz, the researcher at Johns Hopkins University who defines such a school as a “dropout factory.”

There are about 1,700 regular or vocational high schools nationwide that fit that description, according to an analysis of Education Department data conducted by Johns Hopkins for The Associated Press. That’s 12 percent of all such schools, no more than a decade ago but no less, either.

While some of the missing students transferred, most dropped out, Balfanz says. The data tracked senior classes for three years in a row — 2004, 2005 and 2006 — to make sure local events like plant closures weren’t to blame for the low retention rates.

The highest concentration of dropout factories is in large cities or high-poverty rural areas in the South and Southwest. Most have high proportions of minority students. These schools are tougher to turn around, because their students face challenges well beyond the academic ones — the need to work as well as go to school, for example, or a need for social services.

For people around the world, the United States is not merely a country, and not merely a superpower. The United States is also a symbol of human freedom.

Because their country is a symbol, the way that American officials behave is rarely taken at face value. Rather, their behavior is interpreted and reinterpreted by friend and foe alike.

Because she has no statutory power, the American First Lady’s actions are wholly symbolic. So when last week First Lady Laura Bush embarked on a visit to the Persian Gulf to promote breast cancer awareness in the Arab world as part of the US-Middle East Partnership for Breast Cancer, she traveled there as a symbol. And the symbolic message that her visit evoked is a deeply disturbing one.

As a Washington Post report of her trip to Saudi Arabia from last Thursday noted, there is a dire need in the kingdom to raise public awareness of breast cancer and its treatments. Due to social taboos, some 70 percent of breast cancer cases in Saudi Arabia are not reported until the late stages of the disease. It is possible that the local media attention that Mrs. Bush’s visit aroused may work to save the lives of women whose husbands will now permit them to be screened for the disease and receive proper medical treatment for it in its early stages.

And this is where the disturbing aspect of Mrs. Bush’s visit enters the picture. During her public appearances, the First Lady limited her remarks to the issue of breast cancer awareness. Yet in the Persian Gulf, it is impossible to separate the issue of breast cancer or for that matter the very fact of the First Lady’s visit from the issue of the systematic mistreatment and oppression of women in the Saudi Arabia specifically and throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds generally.

IN THE context of the regional degradation of women, while the consequences of Mrs. Bush’s visit remain mixed, the overall effect of her mission was negative.

Women in Saudi Arabia do not have human rights. As Amnesty International puts it, “The abuse of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia is not simply the unfortunate consequence of overzealous security forces and religious police. It is the inevitable result of a state policy which gives women fewer rights than men, which means that women face discrimination in all walks of life and which allows men with authority to exercise their power without any fear of being held to account for their actions.”

For instance, women in Saudi Arabia cannot choose whom they marry and they have no real power to divorce their husbands. Men on the other hand can lawfully marry up to four women and divorce any of them simply by announcing that they have divorced them. And once they are divorced, they are by law and practice denied custody of their children.

Marital rape and physical abuse are not generally considered crimes and therefore women have no legal recourse for dealing with abusive husbands, or fathers or brothers. Since they are legally barred from serving as lawyers, and Islam weighs a woman’s court testimony as worth half the testimony of a man, even if they were able to press charges against their male tormentors, Saudi women are effectively denied recourse in the local courts.

Women of course are not the only victims of the Saudi regime. Non-Muslims are denied the right to worship. Shi’ite Muslims’ right to worship is subject to draconian limitations. Jews are officially barred from entering the kingdom. Then too, there are no real elections in Saudi Arabia, no press freedom, no freedom of assembly. Yet even against this totalitarian backdrop the position of women stands out in its severity.

Take education for example. As the State Department’s 2006 Human Rights report notes, there is little academic freedom in Saudi Arabia. For instance, “The government prohibited the study of Freud, Marx, Western music, and Western philosophy.” Yet women’s educational opportunities are even more constrained. Due to gender apartheid, women may only study in all female institutions. There they are prohibited from studying fields like law and engineering and petroleum sciences. In 2005 the BBC reported, “Although women make up more than half of all graduates from Saudi universities, they comprise only 5 percent of the kingdom’s workforce.”

Saudi women have no freedom of movement. They may not drive. And they may not move around in public unless escorted by their husband, father or brother. Women found in public unescorted by suitable males are subject to arrest and corporal punishment.

The limitations placed on public appearances are mind boggling. As Freedom House reported in 2005, “Visible and invisible spatial boundaries also limit women’s movement. Mosques, most ministries, public streets, and food stalls (supermarkets not included) are male territory. Furthermore, accommodations that are available for men are always superior to those accessible to women, and public space, such as parks, zoos, museums, libraries, or the national Jinadriyah Festival of Folklore and Culture, is created for men, with only limited times allotted for women’s visits.”

TO THE extent that women in Saudi Arabia are allowed leave their homes, they are prohibited from actually being seen by anyone through the rigid enforcement of Islamic dress codes. As the State Department 2006 report explains, “In public, a woman was expected to wear an abaya (a black garment that covers the entire body) and also to cover her head and hair. The religious police generally expected Muslim women to cover their faces and non-Muslim women from other Asian and African countries to comply more fully with local customs of dress than non-Muslim Western women. During the year religious police admonished and harassed citizen and noncitizen women who failed to wear an abaya and hair cover.”

Perhaps it is because it is so offensive to the Western eye to see women covered like sacks of potatoes, the abaya has become a symbol of Islamic oppression and degradation of women. Although outlawing their use, as the French have attempted to do in recent years, is itself a form of religious oppression, the sentiment informing their ban is certainly understandable. The fact is that a free society should not be able to easily stomach the notion that women should be encouraged, let alone obliged to wear degrading garments that deny them the outward vestiges of their humanity and individuality.

Due to the fact that the abayas convey a symbolic message of effective enslavement of women, Mrs. Bush’s interaction with women clad in abayas was the aspect of her trip most scrutinized. In the United Arab Emirates, Mrs. Bush was photographed sitting between four women covered head to toe in abayas while she was wearing regular clothes. The image of Mrs. Bush sitting between four women who look like nothing more than black piles of fabric couldn’t have been more viscerally evocative and consequently, symbolically meaningful.

The image told the world that she – and America – is free and humane while the hidden women of Arabia are enslaved and their society is inhumane.

But then Mrs. Bush went to Saudi Arabia and the symbolic message of the previous day was superseded and lost when she donned an abaya herself and had her picture taken with other abaya-clad women. The symbolic message of those photographs also couldn’t have been clearer. By donning an abaya, Mrs. Bush symbolically accepted the legitimacy of the system of subjugating women that the garment embodies, (or disembodies). Understanding this, conservative media outlets in the US criticized her angrily.

Sunday morning, Mrs. Bush sought to answer her critics in an interview with Fox News. Unfortunately, her remarks compounded the damage. Mrs. Bush said, “These women do not see covering as some sort of subjugation of women, this group of women that I was with. That’s their culture. That’s their tradition. That’s a religious choice of theirs.”

It is true that this is their culture. And it is also their tradition. But it is not their choice. Their culture and tradition are predicated on denying them the choice of whether or not to wear a garment that denies them their identity just as it denies them the right to make any choices about their lives. The Saudi women’s assertions of satisfaction with their plight were no more credible than statements by hostages in support of their captors.

As the First Lady, Laura Bush is an American symbol. By having her picture taken wearing an abaya in Saudi Arabia – the epicenter of Islamic totalitarian misogyny – Mrs. Bush diminished that symbol. In so doing, she weakened the causes of freedom and liberty which America has fought since its founding to secure and defend at home and throughout the world.

10.29.07

Our webhost did not have a chance to upgrade their servers Friday night.
They are now planning on starting at 10:00 pm Eastern Tonight (10-29-07) and ending by 7:00 am Eastern tomorrow (10-30-07).
Once again, this could cause the blog and website not to be available for awhile as they are doing the upgrade. Everything should be back to normal when they are done.
Thanks,
-Steve

More “peace and love” threats from those ever so-called “peaceful” Muslims.

AUSTRALIA faces a “London-type bombing” if relations between Muslims and the intelligence and police authorities do not improve, an influential Islamic youth leader has warned.

Fadi Rahman, who runs one of Sydney’s biggest youth centres at Lidcombe in the city’s west, said overseas Islamic elements were attempting to radicalise Muslim youth with their hardline ideologies.

But in a warning that will resonate with Australian authorities, Mr Rahman said Muslims did not trust ASIO or the Australian Federal Police and that the bungled terror case against Gold Coast doctor Mohamed Haneef had worsened the situation. “The biggest problem ASIO and the federal police have is that no one in the Islamic community trusts them enough to give them a heads-up about anything,” Mr Rahman told The Australian.

“Look at the Haneef thing – why would we trust these guys when all you see is one fumble after another? People are afraid.”

Dr Haneef, an Indian national, was detained in July on suspicion of having played a role in the foiled terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, but the case fell apart after a series of prosecution mistakes.

Mr Rahman said a battle for the hearts and minds of young Muslims was under way in Australia between influences from overseas wanting to radicalise youths and more moderate influences in Australia.

Mr Rahman said he believed he had been the target of a recruitment attempt but when he responded “defensively” those talking to him said they had merely been joking.

Asked about the anatomy of a recruitment, he said: “Most of the time they start at the local mosque in small groups – they move quickly into the garage, then people’s homes. You get sucked in.”

He said the typical recruiter was in their 40s or 50s, “from overseas, well-educated and tapping into young people’s frustrations and anger”.

“I think we are very similar to London,” he said. “There are these individuals from overseas who are basically in their mid-life who have these ideologies and because of the animosity they have experienced in their own countries have deep hatred of the Western world. It’s very easy to tap into the mind of someone who has a low education level, unemployment and who has basically given up on life.

“The right ingredients are there. We need to do something or what happened in London, a London-type bombing, will happen here.”

The “something” includes programs to give opportunities to Muslim youth and a “less hostile” attitude by the federal Government. Mr Rahman said the Government was spending too much on campaigns directed at people who did not know what was going on – such as the Be Alert, Not Alarmed campaign – but not enough in communities such as southwestern Sydney, where about 250,000 Muslims live. “It’s not like it will be John Smith on the north shore of Sydney who will have information, it will be Mohammed or Ahmed out here,” he says.

Mr Rahman said he and Toufic Mallah, the man he brought into the youth centre to stress moderation, preached non-violence.

About 50 of the youths at the centre, which has about 460 members aged 10 to 35, are former criminals who have done time in jail. Mr Rahman said they could go “either way”.

At the Independent Centre of Research Australia, he runs anger-management programs and has opened a prayer room run by Sheik Mallah. Sheik Mallah said the second chapter of the Koran stressed that “we have made a moderate nation”.

He says non-Muslim Australians should approach their local sheiks if there was anything they did not understand or like about their local Muslim communities. “Come and speak to us,” he said.

OK, here’s the deal on this. There is a sexually transmitted disease, called human papilloma virus, that can cause cervical cancer.
Politicians here in the U.S. as well as Britain, have started to push for this to be a mandatory injection for all young women.
Now, here’s what’s wrong with this idea:
1. This assumes every female is going to have premarital sex and get infected. That is not true.
2. The vaccine has serious side effects and has been linked to the death of at least eight girls. It has not been tested well enough.
3. As with all sexually transmitted diseases, if people would follow what God told them to in the Bible, and not have sex until they get married, there would be no sexually transmitted diseases. Abstinence is the only 100% effective means of preventing sexually transmitted diseases.

EIGHT deaths have been linked to the cervical cancer jab which will be given to every 12-year-old girl in Britain under Government plans announced last week.

Doctors suspect the jab, which protects against a sexually transmitted human papilloma virus that causes the cancer, may be implicated in 3,461 adverse reactions, including paralysis and seizures.

Last week Health Secretary Alan Johnson revealed plans to vaccinate all girls aged between 12 and 13 to cut Britain’s death rate from the disease. He said: “Prevention is better than cure and this vaccine will prevent many women from catching the virus in the first place.”

However, reports from the US, where the Gardasil vaccine has been used for nearly a year in some states, reveal that eight victims died soon after receiving it. The victims, aged from as young as 11 to 22, suffered blood clots or heart attacks.

Thousands of side effects have also been linked, many serious. These include 15 cases of paralysis and 239 cases of temporary loss of consciousness. Other suspected reactions include convulsions and numbness.

Tom Fitton, head of US health lobby group Judicial Watch, said: “The adverse event reports on the HPV vaccine reads like a catalogue of horrors. Any state or local government now beset by lobbying campaigns to mandate this vaccine for young girls ought to take a look at these adverse health reports. It looks as if an unproven vaccine with dangerous side effects is being pushed as a miracle drug.”

Sounds like the Episcopal leadership has lied to their fellowship again.

SAN FRANCISCO – Delegates representing Episcopal churches in the San Francisco Bay area have approved three sets of prayers that clergy can use to bless same-sex couples, despite a pledge by the denomination’s bishops not to authorize special rites for homosexual unions.

During the annual convention of the Diocese of California, about 500 lay delegates and clergy members also approved a resolution challenging last month’s decision by Episcopal bishops to refrain from approving any more homosexual bishops to preserve the global Anglican community.

Two Canadian dioceses also have endorsed creating services forn same-sex blessing ceremonies. The Bay Area diocese is believed to be the first in the U.S. to make the such rites available.

My take on the possibility of God’s sending geophysical judgment-like warnings of correction to America (or any people, for that matter) has been called, in no uncertain terms, “crap theology” –if you will pardon my repeating the condemnation jabbed at yours truly by someone not long ago. So, this commentary will doubtless not be well received by those who see only coincidence in the horrendous fires breaking out in California almost simultaneously with California Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger signing into law SB777. That is the new law stipulating that there must not be any mention of immorality with regard to homosexuality within the textbooks or curricula of California’s public schools. Further, the law provides protection to those who promote such alternative lifestyles to heterosexuality in schools across that state. Part of the governor’s approved movement into gender neutrality is the absolute reprobate proposition that boys and girls can choose which of the gender-marked restrooms they wish to utilize.Sorry, my dear friends of the contrary mindset in this matter, but I see a dramatic instance of God’s mighty finger of His displeasure pointing through the headlines we watched, read, and heard this past week. I believe with all that is within my spirit that God is pointing in growing anger to the fact that America is continuing to slap him in His face with down-spiraling disobedience to His holy ways of righteousness. It is in this context that I’ve titled this week’s Nearing Midnight commentary: “U.S.A. – God’s Parenthetic Nation.”

God works in strange but wonderful ways with parentheses. For example, there is a monumental parenthesis in God’s dealing with mankind between weeks 69 and 70 of Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy. I won’t go into detail here for sake of brevity. But, to learn all about the prophet Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy, look up the many articles written by Dr. Thomas Ice by that title on raptureready.com.

God’s Word skips right across time–to this point almost 2,000 years from the time of Jesus’ crucifixion until some point in the future when that same crucified and resurrected Jesus will shout: “Come up here!” The intervening period of years is that parenthesis of which I write. We call it the Church Age, or the Age of Grace. When the Church goes to be with Christ as outlined in 1 Corinthians 15:51-55 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, the parenthesis of the Age of Grace will be closed. Daniel’s 70th week will begin, then, when Antichrist signs a peace contract between Israel and her enemies.

By analogy, America, in my view, is a parenthesis in God’s dealing with mankind. God has seen fit to not mention this, inarguably the greatest nation to ever exist, so far as technological development and wealth is concerned. The United States is a mystery of sorts. It is mentioned nowhere in the Bible by name–nor even by inference, in my thinking.

I know that many see America in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other books of prophecy. I see America in type in those books, but I don’t see the prophets actually and specifically pointing to this nation. Yet God has so obviously chosen America for spectacular feats. Again, for brevity, I mention the most spectacular –acting as midwife for the birth of modern Israel, and as her protector, in human terms, to this point in history. Also, this nation has disseminated the Gospel message throughout the world –a thing no other nation has done.

A prudent question to ask is: Since God has so obviously chosen the U.S.A. to do such an important job, would He not then bless it? Also, would He not hold it to an extremely high standard, in keeping with His unchanging edict: “…For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required…” (Luke 12: 48b)?

Now, here is where I get in trouble with the “crap theology” flame throwers who see the events of recent headlines as coincidence.

I believe God has put this nation this past week in another type of parenthesis. On the left coast are the fires of perhaps unprecedented scope –certainly unprecedented in modern times. On the right coast has been drought of what the most optimistic meteorologists are calling a drought of the 100-year sort.

Here is yet another example of what Islam is all about. In Saudi Arabia, officers for the “Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice”, kept girls from leaving a burning school because they were not wearing the headscarves and abayas (black robes) required by Saudi’s strict interpretation of Islam. The religious police beat young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the appropriate clothing. They went as far as to stop men who tried to help the girls and warned “it is a sinful to approach them”. The school watchman even refused to open the gates to let the girls out.

Saudi Arabia’s religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress, according to Saudi newspapers.

In a rare criticism of the kingdom’s powerful “mutaween” police, the Saudi media has accused them of hindering attempts to save 15 girls who died in the fire on Monday.

About 800 pupils were inside the school in the holy city of Mecca when the tragedy occurred.

According to the al-Eqtisadiah daily, firemen confronted police after they tried to keep the girls inside because they were not wearing the headscarves and abayas (black robes) required by the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islam.

One witness said he saw three policemen “beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya”.

The Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that the police – known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – had stopped men who tried to help the girls and warned “it is a sinful to approach them”.

The father of one of the dead girls said that the school watchman even refused to open the gates to let the girls out.

“Lives could have been saved had they not been stopped by members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” the newspaper concluded.

Relatives’ anger

Families of the victims have been incensed over the deaths.

Most of the victims were crushed in a stampede as they tried to flee the blaze.

The school was locked at the time of the fire – a usual practice to ensure full segregation of the sexes.

The religious police are widely feared in Saudi Arabia. They roam the streets enforcing dress codes and sex segregation, and ensuring prayers are performed on time.

Those who refuse to obey their orders are often beaten and sometimes put in jail.

10.26.07

A senior Palestinian intelligence official said that based on meetings with American diplomats he “understood” the U.S. plans to target Iran’s suspected nuclear installations in two to three months if negotiations with Tehran don’t generate a major breakthrough.

The official, speaking to WND yesterday on condition of anonymity, said according to what he “understood,” the U.S. will “pay” for Arab support for a U.S. strike against Iran by creating a temporary Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank by next summer.

The official met last week with U.S. secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her trip here earlier this month to prepare for a U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian summit slated for next month in which Israel is expected to outline a future Palestinian state in most of the West Bank.